We headed out the door, and I was so excited that someone else was going to broach the topic of my IAC with my sister that I almost walked out the front door of the building.
“Cassidy Elizabeth!” Jamie shouted at me. “Come here, please!”
“Ugh, why does everyone know my middle name?” I muttered, spinning to go into the doctor’s office. “It’s like having ten older siblings.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Brandon reminded me.
“Yes, James?” I asked, folding my hands in front of myself like a choir girl.
He snickered. “Come here, and let me check those teeth of yours.”
I sighed but complied and crossed over to a medical exam table he had set up in the far corner of his office. I hopped up, and he turned on an overhead light. He grabbed a shiny little mirror and a tongue depressor, and I said, “Ah,” like a good patient.
It only took him
“You’re hearing what?” Cadence asked, standing in front of me with her arms crossed, a look of disbelief marring her pretty face.I was still sitting on Jamie’s examination table, but the doctor was standing next to my sister and my parents now, Brandon sitting next to me, his hand bumped up against mine. Aaron was across the room, and I couldn’t tell if he wasn’t right up in my business like everyone else because he didn’t think he belonged there or because somehow he already knew what we needed to discuss.“I know, it sounds nuts…” I began.“No, it doesn’t,” Brandon cut me off. “It sound remarkable.”I looked at him and smiled. “They’re just whispers, fragments of sentences, nothing I can even understand.”“Wow. Just… wow,” my mom said, her mouth agape much like my sister’s had been up until a moment ago.&l
“Let’s go,” Jamie said once I’d stepped back. I looked at him, grateful for his help, but also thankful that he was moving on this before any minds could be changed. “Who do you want with you, Cass? The room where Christian installs them is a little small. You can really only have two people in there, maybe three.”“Well, you, of course,” I said to the doctor without hesitating.“Good call,” Brandon assured me.I looked at my mother. “Do you want to come?”“No, honey, I don’t,” she said, smoothing my hair back. “Your father and I will wait for you here.”Nodding, I turned to my sister. She smiled at me, stepped forward, hugged me tightly, and said, “Take Brandon. We’ll wait outside the door.”With a deep breath, I let her go, and turning to look at him, I asked, “Will you go with me?”“To the prom?&
That night, my mom made baked chicken (only my mom would go grocery shopping while she’s on vacation) and we had a nice meal in the borrowed apartment. As much as everyone seemed nonchalant and genuinely carefree, I had so many things on my mind. About halfway through dessert, I asked, “So when do I get to start my training?”“Oh, Cassidy,” my mother exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “Can you just slow down a little bit?”“Why?” I asked, trying to keep my tone even. “I think it would be beneficial for me to start while I’m here this week. I don’t have anything else to do.” I shrugged and looked from my sister’s disapproving face to Aaron’s. He looked somewhat more likely to agree with me, as usual.“Are you sure you even want to?” Cadence asked. “It’s a lot of work. Just ask Brandon.”I turned to my right and looked at him. “Yeah, it is
Aurora was a beast, and she wasn’t taking any prisoners. I should’ve known when I was warned by multiple people that this wouldn’t be a walk in the park, but she was very supportive of me. Even when she was kicking my rear end, and even when I wanted to give up and fall over, she would shout some encouragement my way, usually in the form of an insult, and I would pick up the pace. Brandon wasn’t joking. By the time we were finally done with running the obstacle course, practicing The Hill—which was killer—and lap swimming for an hour in the pool, I was completely drained. My muscles ached, and I wondered how difficult it might be to get Jamie to swing by and give me a hug or something so I could restore the torn muscle tissue all over my body.I was in the shower area, getting dressed, when Aurora came in. She was as fresh as a daisy since she hadn’t actually been working out any herself. There were four other girls in the room with u
After we stuffed ourselves on pizza, Brandon said, “Come on. We’ve got an appointment.” I raised an eyebrow at him but took his hand as he led me to the door. I had no idea where we were going. In fact, we hadn’t even talked about Aaron the entire time we’d been eating, choosing to swap high school drama stories instead. Brandon had a few doozies, even though he generally kept away from drama. So, I had no idea where he was taking me, but I went along, thinking it might have something to do with the great mystery both of us were trying to solve.“Any idea when your sister is going to teach you how to use your IAC?” he asked as we walked along.“Nope. I haven’t even spoken to her today,” I admitted. “I think I can probably figure it out on my own, though.”“Yeah, it’s really not that hard, once you know the basic commands. And there’s some really cool stuff in the archives,
“Wow,” I muttered. So my sister had saved Aaron’s life. He’d saved her from the bullet in France, and she’d brought him back from the brink of death after the re-Transformation serum. “But did you actually die?”He shrugged. “Cadence says I did. I don’t honestly remember.”“Why did Cadence give it to you and not Jamie?” Brandon asked.“I had flown to Ireland, hoping to re-Transform alone. But she followed me there and arrived just in time.”I remembered thinking it was odd that my sister had been in Ireland right after Elliott died, right before she came to tell me that he’d been killed. Now, it made sense. Funny how the longer I stuck around, the more questions I asked, the more puzzle pieces seemed to start to fit together.“Do you think that’s why you’re so much faster than everyone else now?” Brandon asked. “And so much strong
Messing with my sister had become one of my favorite past times recently. I’m not exactly sure why this was, but I seemed to be doing it at every opportunity. So, when she sat down with me to show me how to use my IAC, I had to give her a hard time. I’d basically already figured everything out within the first minute and a half of her telling me the commands, but whenever she asked me to demonstrate something for her, I had to play dumb. It was entertaining.“Okay, just go ahead and think, ‘Cadence Full On,’ and you should see my name pop up in the corner of your line of sight.”“Okay,” I said, making a face like I was really concentrating. Brandon was sitting in a chair across the room while my parents were out for an after-dinner stroll around the campus, and I think Aaron was working on something as usual.“You got it?” she asked.“I don’t know. Is it working?”“
Cadence was clearly trying to determine if a Vampire Hunter could kill a Hybrid through determination and will power alone. She had me running up and down The Hill for almost an hour, after weight training, an hour in the pool, and almost two hours on the treadmill. I really thought by the end I wasn’t going to be able to take anymore, but every time she gave me another order, I said, “Yes, El Capitan!” over the IAC, just to show her I could, and then did it. I didn’t say a single word out loud to her for the entire attempted murder, I mean, workout session, and I also managed to request visuals from her at least every five minutes, which she continuously denied. I knew I should be the grownup and let it go, but I was trying to prove a point to her—I just didn’t know exactly what it was.After about my thousandth run up The Hill, she finally said, “Okay, that’s it. We’re done.”I bent over and put my